head-to-head

inclusionAI: Ling 3.0 Flash vs Thinking Machines: Inkling

Side-by-side comparison of specs, pricing, benchmark scores, and task rankings. Updated 2026-10-02.

inclusionAI: Ling 3.0 Flash Thinking Machines: Inkling
Vendorinclusionaithinkingmachines
Quality Score100100
Benchmark Score30.439.4
Input Price$0.02/M$0.95/M
Output Price$0.06/M$4.05/M
Context Window262,144524,288
Max Output32,768262,144
Tool Calling✓✓
Structured Output✓-
Reasoning Mode✓✓
Vision-✓
Audio-✓
Benchmark Scores
ai_index33.241.2

The verdict

For a sample job of 1 million input tokens and 250,000 output tokens, Ling 3.0 Flash costs $0.037 and Inkling costs $1.96, so Ling 3.0 Flash is about 53.4 times cheaper for the same work.

Inkling reads up to 524,288 tokens at once, roughly 786 pages of text, against about 393 pages for Ling 3.0 Flash.

Only Ling 3.0 Flash offers structured output; only Inkling offers image input and audio input.

On our blended benchmark score Inkling leads 39.4 to 30.4.

Across the 20 tasks where they differ, Ling 3.0 Flash scores higher on 9 (SQL Generation, Unit Test Generation, Regex Writing and others), Inkling on 11 (Code Review, Code Completion, Code Refactoring and others).

Pick Ling 3.0 Flash if you need lower cost or structured output; pick Inkling if you need long documents, image input, audio input or benchmark performance.

Costs use current list prices per million tokens; page counts assume about 0.75 words per token and 500 words per page.

Who wins by task?

TaskinclusionAI: Ling 3.0 FlashThinking Machines: Inkling
SQL Generation 135 130
Code Review 132 135
Code Completion 129 131
Code Refactoring 133 138
Bug Fixing 136 143
Unit Test Generation 125 120
Code Documentation 129 134
Regex Writing 123 123
CI/CD Pipelines 121 120
Frontend Component Design 96 122
Data Analysis 129 126
CSV / Spreadsheet Cleanup 129 123
ETL Scripting 127 129
JSON Extraction 132 119
Bulk Data Labeling 130 124
OCR / Document Parsing 84 125
Table Extraction from PDFs 84 125
Long-Document Summarization 135 144
Short-Form Summarization 125 125
Blog Post Writing 123 126

Scores reflect capability match + benchmark data + pricing for each task. Methodology →

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